


why fear death (be scared of living)

by justwaitaclocktick



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Blood, Character Death, F/M, M/M, Panic Attacks, dark magic au, didn't, i get so bored with latin incantations but i was too lazy to think of something else so i just, this has literally no plot whatsoever i'm so sorry, this is nowhere near as dark as i wanted it to go, this week on Chris Fucks Shit Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-13
Updated: 2014-09-13
Packaged: 2018-02-17 04:49:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2297153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justwaitaclocktick/pseuds/justwaitaclocktick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the inky blueness of midnight fades to morning light, Scott mumbles something and rolls over, latches himself onto Derek. His hand clamps onto Derek’s shoulder, his nose presses in between his shoulder blades.</p><p>It’s horrifying. It’s everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	why fear death (be scared of living)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sikenesque](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sikenesque/gifts).



> title from laura marling's "hope in the air".
> 
>  
> 
> ("pick up your rope, lord / sling it to me / if we are to battle i must not be weak.")

 

ONE.

Whispers, white curtains, midnight. A boy on a cold wooden floor, pale blue petals pressed over his eyelids.

Outside, the moon is shrouded in total and absolute night. There is no beacon in the sky for the boy to follow, nothing to guide him back home but the steady pulse of his heart.

The veins in the petals quiver—this is just barely detectable by even the most acute eye—and seem almost to darken. 

He’s coming back.

First, his fingers. They’re long and dark, only a little knobby, and they tremble. Derek holds himself completely still, shoulders tense. He is ready to spring should anything go wrong, and he wants nothing more than to touch Scott’s hands to see if there is anything left within him, to ensure that he will return to this body.

But as soon as his fingers begin to shake, so do his lips. They are thin, rosy, ready to burst into a wide smile. To see them like this—drained, sharp, tight—makes Derek’s breath go ragged. Scott’s lips cease to quiver.

They part, and this breath is Scott’s first in exactly one hour. His breathing is erratic for a few seconds before his chest stops heaving and his hips lay flat on the floor again. (And how they bucked, movements sharp, heels straining against the bare floor.) 

After what might have been ten minutes or ten seconds, Scott opens his eyes.

“Derek,” he says, and Derek is on his knees in a heartbeat. He sweeps the petals off of Scott’s face, gently as he can. 

“Well?” Derek says, trying to look only at Scott in his peripheral vision now that the boy is awake. “Was it all right?”

Derek can almost feel the laughter bubbling up in Scott’s long neck.

“It was wicked,” he says, and his eyes are shining. The colour is coming back to his lips, slowly. So slowly, and Derek longs for them to return in full.

Scott’s teeth are bright white like a good boy’s, but his grin is black as night.

* * *

TWO.

The smoke rising from the cup (frosted plastic, with dinosaurs around the edges in bright colours) is thick and white, and the heavy shapes it forms as it twists and curls and engulfs itself—well, they remind Scott of a mouth. The room—sparsely furnished, large windows, lit dark purple but yellow around the edges, like so many sunrises and sunsets flattened together under a mallet—smells of mint and soil.

The smoke smells like metal, drenched in flowers (an arrow, drenched in blood), and it is pervading the room quickly.

As the scent diffuses, Scott sets the white candle on a tray on the carpet and crosses his legs. From the plastic tray (Derek had offered a copper one) he picks up a heavy, smooth black stone with each hand.

And he closes his eyes.

For a while, there is nothing. The candle burns, the spent match lies there. Scott is still, and he clenches his teeth as he tightens his grip on the stones. The sensation is warm, but wavering, and not altogether a comforting matter.

The candle flickers out and the stones grow very, very hot. 

Scott releases his grip and lets them rest in his palms, arching his fingers backwards. He does not open his eyes, not until the stones stop burning. He lets them drop and strokes his palms to feel the burn marks fading.

Someone takes his hands, fingers cool and almost too soft to be physical.

He opens his eyes, and Allison kisses his burns. The new, clear skin skates over them.

“Hi,” she says, and Scott stares at her iron wrought hair, at her paper-white skin, at the smoke that feeds her sharp, curving mouth.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, and he can’t look into her eyes. He knows exactly how they look—they had been doe-eyes, beautiful and glimmering and brown like wet soil.

(And they had been wide and teary and flickering as the light went out of them, a deer in headlights, a candle snuffed out.)

She cocks her head and the smoke follows, wisps of it missing her lips and trailing up over her jaw, her cheekbones, catching on her eyelashes. She blinks, and it disperses.

Scott doesn’t notice the door creaking open, doesn’t see Chris Argent peer through the crack into his daughter’s bedroom. Doesn’t see the way his dark, hungry eyes absorb all the light coming in from the hallway.

He doesn’t see it, but he can feel it, like the room has grown even colder, like it’s weighing him down on the edges.

He turns to look, but there is nothing.

He hears in the air as he leaves, “Don’t let her trick you.”

* * *

THREE.

The first thing Stiles learns is how to catch lightning with his bare hands.

He learns how to open himself to it, how to cup it in the soft, supple skin of his palms that stretches tight across his long knuckles. 

“It’s about handling energy,” Derek had said one night, dark eyes somber but charged as he screwed a lightbulb into a lamp, flipped the switch, and crushed the glass with no more effort than crumbling a cookie would require. The light didn’t even flicker as he coaxed it into his hand during the split-second of the shatter. He shaped it into a small orb of palest yellow, and the cast it gave to the cuts on his hands was like that of a dying sun.

It’s brilliant, it’s horrific—

So when Lydia calls him with a proposition, he’s all in.

The sky is solid, it seems, a never-ending expanse of gunmetal cloud, shot through with pale veins of marble, not yet saturated with static and rain. It’s dark enough that headlights are a necessity; they flash past, paired pinpricks of light reflected off of Lydia’s gleaming eyes as cars jet by on the road bordering the field. 

The Jeep is parked nearer to the road than Stiles would have liked, but Lydia had insisted in the name of physics or something, Stiles didn’t fucking know.

“Derek always says to be careful, above all else,” Lydia tells him for the third time that night. “Lightning. A massive piece of metal. Imagine.”

Stiles rolls his eyes, squirms a little. They’ve been standing still for too long. “You only told Kira?”

Lydia nods, and far off, beyond the tree line of the forest that surrounds them on three sides, a white flash permeates the stark gloom of the sky.

“Let’s get to work.”

(Lying in his bed, Stiles will realize he hadn’t noticed the thunder until afterwards when it will ring in his ears for hours; it had just been a constant rolling, more a force than a sound, undulating through the thick, charged air as his hair stood on end.)

(It was, well, electrifying.)

Lydia goes first, and Stiles didn’t think it wise to try and stop her. This requires precision; he would never be able to surpass her in that regard.

She stands as near to the center of the field as they can judge, and the thickly knit cotton sweater looks almost to be hovering above her skin, above her strong shoulders and flawless rosy skin. Her skirt flutters in what is too savage to be called a breeze, and the tall, dying grass sways around her legs, bridging the gap between Lydia’s skirt and her knees.

Stiles thinks she looks like she could lead an army, and then he feels it in the air: a golden-red whisper, so sharp and hot it feels like ten below.

Lydia cups her palms and Stiles can hear her breathing slow (Stiles can hear the last of the life in the tall grass evaporating, can hear the leaves upturning for the rain, can smell the lavender-honey soap on Lydia who stands far enough away to be uninhibited by Stiles’ magic, but close enough that he can reach her if need be).

Her eyes are half closed, her hair whipping around her face, and when she tilts her head back, she opens her eyes wide and looks like a god.

Afterwards, when Stilles has taken her place, Lydia will describe it as reptilian. A brilliant line of electricity snakes down from the impenetrable layer of clouds directly into his cupped hands, an ice-white dragon ready to claim its prey, a rattlesnake, the teeth of a velociraptor.

And as it strikes his hands—rather, the fraction of a millimeter of space afforded between his bare skin and the flaming whip of lightning—it coils into a sphere.

As they practice, it becomes less of a ritual; it’s easier, it’s like laughing, but the same wicked smile always graces their faces.

Stiles finds that it feels like taking his first breath, the way it coils up his arms, around his neck, the way the sparks glint in his eyes.

He wants to feel like this forever.

* * *

FOUR.

The knucklebones clatter against the oaken table and Derek says the words, but the message is always the same.

_Folly. A devil’s trap. Violence._

Derek sighs. He sighs a lot, but the sound is overtaken by the whisperings in his head, the voices of the bones—click, hiss, _regret_ —howling in miniature. 

He hears a faint knock at the door and then the hinges creaking, deafened by the prophecies swirling in his brain from the bones. 

“Derek?”

He rushes to sweep them off the table into the black silk bag, the sound growing louder all the while. He ties the drawstring and the voices are silenced—but not before a rushing in his head and the words _black magic_ —cut off as he blows out the candle. The other small flames the fill the kitchen aren’t enough.

“Derek, what are you doing?” Scott says. He hugs himself with one arm, the other holding his phone up as a flashlight. “Why is it always candles?”

Derek pockets the bag and rises smoothly to his feet. He takes the phone from Scott—pliant Scott—and turns the light out before handing it back. “Didn’t I teach you better than that?”

He holds out his palm and conjures a small flame.

Scott grins sheepishly down at his feet. Derek realizes he has placed himself awfully close.

“What do you need?” Derek allows the flame to grow ever so slightly, illuminating Scott’s heavy eyes.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Scott says. “I dreamed that—” He clears his throat. “That all my fingers were broken.” He’s not crying, but he looks close. “Can I please stay on the couch?”

The flame continues to swell, wavering, dangerously close to Scott’s soft, dark skin.

Derek is shaking a little bit, but so is Scott. He closes his fist and extinguishes the flame, leads Scott upstairs. He doesn’t have an overnight bag, brought only his keys and his phone. 

Derek tells Scott to sit on the bed while he finds him a toothbrush, and when he comes back, Scott is passed out, legs dangling off the edge. Derek freezes in his tracks, leaves the toothbrush on the nightstand. He changes into sweatpants and a wifebeater—he sleeps naked in general, but, well—and helps Scott, half-asleep, properly into the bed. 

Scott talks in his sleep, Derek finds, as he is kept awake, staring at the ceiling, afraid he will wake up draped across Scott’s body. 

But as the inky blueness of midnight fades to morning light, Scott mumbles something and rolls over, latches himself onto Derek. His hand clamps onto Derek’s shoulder, his nose presses in between his shoulder blades.

It's horrifying. It's everything.

* * *

 

FIVE.

The rain takes Kira by surprise. She had been too deep within the words of the book, she supposes, to notice the clouds rolling in and the sky going dark. When the clouds break, her head lurches up to see her field of view out the window quickly obscured by the rain, pummeling the shrubs out front. The world looks as though through stippled glass.

She returns to the book, delicately turning the large, thin pages. She will have to wash her hands afterwards—it smells of old things and soft foreboding, of acrid ink and dust settled in the ridges between the spine and the covers. The book is large laterally but not very thick at all; Kira was surprised, but found that multiple entries made it onto single pages, and there was but a semblance of order to the spells.

“There,” Malia says, peering at the book from over Kira’s shoulder. “That’s the one he wanted.” She touches the words, wiping off a thin layer of dust. Kira is almost afraid that the ornate, spiky letters will come off the page, but they stay put.

It says “for bridling”.

“This one?” Kira says. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Malia clicks her tongue. “But I have a better idea.” She leans farther across Kira and finds the index, flips to the page she needs. At the top: “for victims”.

* * *

SIX.

Four months prior: it’s September and the leaves are finally starting to succumb to their own sort of magic.

It’s Lydia who finds Derek passed out in the woods behind one of the nicer neighborhoods in Beacon Hills, lying spread eagle across a large rock which seems almost to struggle against his dead weight. In a circle around the stone are white feathers, weighted with pebbles and scattered with creamy white petals of all kinds.

“Derek,” she calls out, “Derek?” She breaches the circle, prods his shoulder until his eyes flutter open and he sits bolt upright.

“What are you doing here?” he says, half-snarling as his heart rate settles and his claws retract. 

“I live in the neighborhood,” Lydia snorts. And she tells him of his voice in her head, waking her in the pale morning, dragging her out of bed, into some shoes and out the door. “What are you doing here? I was afraid you were dying.”

So Derek gathers the materials of his ritual and tells her as they walk down to the river of the illness that’s struck a newborn of a nearby pack, of the blessing he hopes he’s done right. He scatters the feathers and stones and petals into the chilled water and watches them float out of sight, over the edge of a miniature waterfall, glistening and glassy in the morning light.

He tells her because she came to find him, but more because Lydia is powerful and smart and brave, and because he thinks she’d be an excellent student—and a little bit because he’s tired of sitting on this, he wants them to know, he needs to not be alone in its pull anymore.

“I have no doubt that you all can do it,” he says at her countertop over coffee. “I just want you all to be safe.”

And so he tells them all. They aren’t surprised, not really—why should they be? Are they not creatures of magic and darkness and blood, have they not been immersed in the suggestion of a power beyond their own for some time now?

When Stiles asks why Derek is so sure they’re all capable of these _magic tricks,_ Derek replies, simply, “Because you want it.”

And it’s true. They all want it enough, he’s certain. They want it, they’re power-hungry and intelligent and afraid and willing.

He doesn’t tell them all that.

He avoids their eyes, all of them: Kira, to whom this was probably not a secret; Lydia, eyes sparkling with hunger; Malia, who wants to go home; Stiles, same as Lydia, but nowhere near frightened enough by the prospect for this to be a good idea.

So he looks at Scott, who is enthralled, and tries not to feel guilty.

* * *

SEVEN.

Scott is the best at it of all of them—it’s like he knew he could do it all along, when he discovered he could take the pain away, when he pulled the alpha out of his own heart instead of someone else’s, when he he kissed the spot between Derek’s shoulder blades in his sleep and Derek would have done anything for him.

Derek is so, so afraid of the tide of this power—he’s afraid it will wash Scott’s heart away and return it blackened, charred like the wood panelling of the old house.

* * *

EIGHT.

Chris Argent has seen better days.

The only word for him is _ragged,_ one would think, if they saw him setting up the bonfire. He is quick and methodical as he lays out the firewood, but occasionally he stumbles or drops whatever he’s carrying. He curses, his eyes flashy steely, and he gets back to work, his torn khaki sleeve warping as he hoists log after log onto the pile.

He consults the scrap of paper the man in the fortune shop had given him and stuffs it back into his jeans pocket.

Over the logs he drapes jewellry, bedroom curtains, a pair of nude ballet flats he’d found in her closet. Sage, and lavender, and rose petals (the latter he’d been instructed to steep for tea and drink the result before using them); and gasoline.

Chris would never have considered that he could pull this off (he is desperate, though, and that’s all the magic wants, something weak and sad and hungry enough to let it take hold), but he still made some phone calls and found a guy out in a desert town to sell him the spell, to bless the charm he kept around his neck (a jagged piece of rose quartz, veined bloody, pendulous on the silver chain), and told him the best spot out in the desert to do the spell so nothing would catch fire.

So Chris says the words, says a little prayer to no one in particular that it does not rain, and lights the mound with a match he’d dug up from the bottom of his kit.

And then, crying, he drives away, a curtain of dust behind him, blurring the conflagration licking at the violet night.

* * *

NINE.

Derek has them all come to the loft, and they sit in a circle on the bare wooden floor. His shoulder is pressing against Scott’s, which at first made his spine stiffen and his breath go weird but he relaxes as the meetings goes on.

He simply asks that if there’s anything they want to try, he’ll do his best to make a project of it—and he doesn’t even talk about how much better at this Laura was, about how Peter wanted to use the hair from her dead body in a ritual as if he hadn’t fucking killed her—and they leave. He doesn’t detect that they have their own experiments, doesn’t think to warn them against the way the power pulls at your heart and your bones and your blood and begs you to try things you shouldn’t, to overstep the boundaries and cross into a realm you have no place being.

“Derek,” Scott says when they’ve gone, “there’s something _I’d_ like to try.”

Derek says that’s fine and he goes to wash his hands—he doesn’t know why, he needs to leave the room before Scott’s voice ringing in his ears kills him—and when he comes back, Scott is still sitting cross-legged on the floor with his ratty backpack in his lap.

“What is it?” Derek says, kneeling down and settling on the floor.

“I want to try it myself. I need another person.” Scott blushes, Derek chokes a little. “I don’t have it with me but I remember it and it’s not difficult. I—found it in a book Kira had. First we both need to lie down on the floor.”

So they lie down parallel to one another, and Derek asks him if this is some sort of weird transcendence thing. Scott tells him it’s not. “We’re going to try and hear spirits.”

Derek has heard of this sort of thing, and he supposes Kira’s book would have different ways of doing things, being from so far away.

“Now we have to be completely still and calm. If you hear something don’t jump, just breathe. You have to think of pulling a film off of the air and letting them get through.”

So Derek lies there, breathing as slowly and quietly as possible, trying to separate the things he hears as a wolf from the things he hears as a man from the things he hears with his soul, and he does hear the magic of the city buzzing, but that’s nothing new. It’s a little more intense, that’s all.

And then he hears “Can you hear me?” and he nearly jolts before remembering what Scott said.

Derek doesn’t open his eyes, but he can feel Scott’s breath on his face, hear his pumping heartbeat, feel the energy coming off of his hands, so close to Derek’s.

“I have a spirit secret to tell you something,” Scott says, “but my voice is too weak. You have to kiss me to break the curse.”

And Derek, eyes still closed, says in the shakiest voice, “Okay,” and doesn’t think how clever it was of Scott to make him focus on something so hard he wouldn’t hear Scott moving, not even with his ears so close to the creaky floorboards.

Actually, he doesn’t think at all. He just cranes his neck and little and Scott’s full, soft lips come rushing down to meet Derek’s starved mouth.

* * *

TEN.

Stiles wakes up feeling like his breath is screaming to get out of his lungs, so he calls Scott. He doesn’t pick up. 

Malia does when he calls her, though.

“I’m dying, Malia, I can’t—breathe.”

And the book had said this might happen, had warned her that cleansing his body of any darkness remaining, any residue of bad intentions stuck to his cavities peeling off—that this might not be pleasant.

So Malia leaves Kira’s house as silently as she can to crawl into bed next to Stiles, to tell him that he’s fine—and he’s just groggy enough to believe her.

When Stiles wakes up in the proper morning, Malia’s limbs entangled with his, he feels like a fire has torn through his body and left room for the saplings to grow.

He takes Malia out lightning-catching (she is unimpressed; Kira could do this in her sleep), but with the spark still burning within him from Malia’s spell plus the harnessing spell she’d gotten for him—well, he catches the lightning fine, but long after the storm should have been over he calls it down again and again, twines it around his fingers, swallows it and spits it back out.

He bottles it deep within his heart, in his muscles and sinews and bones, even in his blood.

The harnessing ritual had taken a lot out of him, and he’d had to tap into a place deep inside him, darker than he could have without the taint of the Nogitsune still within his soul, so deep Malia’s spell couldn’t strip it away.

She doesn’t tell him about how she and Kira had soaked their hair in lemon juice and scrubbed their bodies raw with sugar and and cinnamon and had said the words like they were praying, holding his image in their minds all the while.

Malia is breathless with it all: the lightning from the sky (the lightning in Stiles’ body), the thrill of watching something come true, the way Stiles goes quiet and looks up at the clouds like he’s seen the face of God.

* * *

ELEVEN.

It’s dark when Kira and Lydia give up.

The bowl seems to be of good quality; it’s wooden and smooth, and will not react with water. They pronounce the words right, and they think they know what they were doing.

But for all the world they cannot do the scrying spell right.

“Isn’t there Skype?” Kira says. Her knees ache from kneeling over this bowl on Lydia’s ice-white carpet.

“That’s not the point,” Lydia says, almost in a growl. The water shimmers, even in the dark, but it doesn’t focus on the target, doesn’t even come close. The surface glows a glimmering grey, like foggy glitter, but that’s all.

Lydia picks the bowl up and and tilts it back. Some of the water trickles down her chin as she drinks. Later on, when she vomits, Kira holds her hair back and helps Lydia take her makeup off.

Kira doesn’t wake up as Lydia gasps and groans and cries in her sleep; the bed is large and soft, and Kira has expended a lot of energy for Lydia’s spell.

Lydia is exhausted as well, but still she dreams.

She sees Jackson, asleep. There must be something wrong with the scrying spell; Jackson shouldn’t be asleep, not with the time difference. She thinks nothing of it, just looks at his naked body overtop the satin sheets.

She once loved this boy, somehow, someway. 

So she is disturbed, forgivably, when Jackson rolls over in the grand square bed so that his front is exposed and, eyes still closed, opens his mouth wide, and screams. And as his body contorts, as he claws at the sheets trying to escape some invisible evil, his voice gives out and becomes Lydia’s.

It wakes her up.

Shuddering, she climbs out of the bed and tries to scrying spell for hours, until the dawn breaks and Kira pads downstairs to find her asleep with one hand in the bowl of water.

Kira takes Lydia’s phone and calls Jackson when Lydia tells her what happened.

“What the fuck happened to me, Lydia. I know you did something.”

“My name is Kira Yukimura, Lydia says she saw you in a dream, convulsing. Are you okay?”

Jackson’s voice cracks. “I—hello. The other night I dreamed that Allison was strangling me in my sleep. Did you know her?” He sounds uncomfortable, like the formality is choking him worse than his dream.

* * *

TWELVE.

The knocking at the door wakes Stiles up.

It’s too early for this (it’s eleven in the morning, what _ever_ ), but he falls out of bed and trudges downstairs even though his heart feels raw and his throat is sore and he feels like his insides have been scrubbed shiny and pink.

He opens the door without looking through the peephole (somewhere his father is scowling) and promptly slams it shut when he sees Allison standing on the other side.

She is resplendent, of course, in the morning light. An empress come to bestow glad tidings upon her people, (crown gone from sight to level the playing field, at least symbolically, but symbols have killed people for less). Her boots come up to her ankles, a soft brown leather, from which rise her legs clad in tights that are far too black, garish against the white of her skirt and her sweater. Her hair seems lighter, not in colour but in the way the light drips off the ends.

She is so, so pale.

She knocks again, a heavy thumping that is too loud and too forceful to be the result of what looks to be such fragile knuckles.

“Stiles?” she calls, and her voice kills Stiles inside, concerned and sharp (and just a tinge metallic?). “Stiles, do you know where Scott is? He wasn’t at home.”

And Stiles can’t get the image of her lightness out of his head, not until the memory of the blood dripping from her wound covers the screen in dark red syrup and is wiped away to reveal her body in Scott’s arms, a memory Stiles should not have, seen only through the mere idea of his red-rimmed eyes.

She was so much more than a body, weak and getting weaker, pontificated by Scott’s pleading eyes and supple arms.

(The panic attacks were supposed to stop, really. The knocking ceases, and when she leaves he can feel the weight lift from his chest and his heart begin to slow.)

* * *

THIRTEEN.

Peter Hale would not consider himself much of a magician, but it’s quite a trick when he opens the door and dodges the arrow of a dead girl walking.

“Oh,” he says when he sees her. “This is tricky indeed. I suppose you’re looking for Scott. No, I haven’t done anything with him but you might try my nephew.” He’s not afraid, he supposes. He rarely is.

And he can tell that it’s not her, not really, but just because it isn’t really Allison doesn’t stop her from really killing him.

* * *

FOURTEEN.

“I want to try something,” Derek tells Scott after they’re done fucking. “But it’s not—“

Scott stops kissing Derek’s neck. “What’s up?”

Derek heaves a sigh. “I have an idea, but it’s not—I’m not supposed to try shit like this. It’s dark stuff, Scott.”

“Do you really want to?”

“Well, but I don’t know that it’s really approved of or whatever. It’s experimental.”

Scott grins wickedly. “Cool.”

And that’s how Derek and Scott—Scott vibrating with energy, with radiance, with blackened naiveté—end up holding hands deep in the woods, staring down a buck.

“We can do this with our, like, bodies, though,” Scott whispers—but it’s more a general breath, a suggestion of words so as not to frighten their quarry. Derek hears him all the same.

“This is different,” Derek tells him, and squeezes his warm palm. It’s getting colder every day, with December in full swing. There’s no snow yet, but it’s coming. “This is. It’s.”

And Derek can’t describe the thrill of what he wants, the way the entire world comes alive with colours he can’t even imagine when he thinks about the possibility. It’s like beyond anything he’s ever thought he could be capable of.

It’s what he thinks about late at night when Kate slips her way into his dreams and whispers to him about _why_ and _how_ and _what it means to be powerful._

He tells himself he doesn’t buy it, but he doesn’t really care that he’s lying.

Still, Scott says, “I trust you.”

That kills Derek, but he can’t go back now. His body is committed, the magic is ready to go.

He lets go of Scott’s hand and immediately misses the warmth, but he thinks as hard and as clearly as possible about the deer, about the way it has to feel when he’s succeeded.

He yelps as he lets it go, and he can almost see the energy rushing out of his mouth, distorting the crisp, cold air and tangling around the animal’s legs.

It falls (so does Derek), but it does not die (neither does Derek). It isn’t even injured.

And Derek is ready to go home, even after just that. “This was a stupid idea.” 

But Scott says, “You want this.”

So he helps Derek to his feet, says something in Spanish, and kisses Derek’s collarbone.

“It’s on the ground. This isn’t fair,” Derek says.

“It’s going to die either way, Derek. I’m sure of it. You’re amazing.”

So Derek swallows the lump in his throat and prepares himself again, trying to access the part deep in the back of his brain, along his brainstem where the intent lurks in shadow.

Derek begins to tremble as he commits himself to the spell.

“I love you,” Scott says, like he’s offering a piece of advice.

_Folly. A devil’s trap. Violence._

Derek lurches forward; the buck seizes for a moment before going limp.

* * *

FIFTEEN.

Derek cries for a little while when he comes back around—Scott tells him he’d been out for half an hour, but he’s crying because he’d gone blind, just for that split second, and saw Scott’s ivory teeth, the primality of the buck’s fear, like a winged beast beating against the inside of his skull; he’d seen colour and love and the endless heart of the winter to come.

He and Scott fuck like animals in the cold, and their bodies are so warm, so charged that it doesn’t even matter that it’s below freezing.

Scott laughs and laughs after they finish, because they literally just had sex in the woods like the werewolves they are.

There is a stinging hiss through the air, and then a quiet twang. Scott stops laughing. Derek is on his feet, covering Scott.

Allison stands before them, armed with a bow that is not hers and a smile that is not alive.

* * *

SIXTEEN.

Before Scott can say or do anything, before Derek can tell him that it’s not her, that he can see through the lie and into the writhing shadowy mass within, Chris Argent sprints up behind her.

“Allison!” he shouts. “Allison, this was a mistake.”

He stops dead in his tracks when he sees Derek helping Scott up, making sure his torso covers him.

“I thought she would be the same,” he says, simple and plain and so sad. “The man in the shop—he said it would be like it was.” 

Derek almost feels sorry for this man who has caused him so much shit, who stands before him like a man out of prison in rags, body stained with blood, face stained with tears. His mouth hangs open—he cannot catch his breath.

“Idiot,” Derek snarls, “you bought a faulty spell.”

Chris just stares.

Allison—the lie that is Allison’s body—whirls around and stabs Chris in the throat with one of her rusty arrows.

“Come on,” Scott hisses as Allison is busy yanking the arrow out of Chris’s shuddering neck. “We have to go, come on.”

He takes Derek’s hand and they run. Scott keeps wiping his tears away; Derek is in shock.

They run and they run but the woods seem endless; it was never like this before, never a labyrinth, never a puzzle. The ground, covered in rust-coloured leaves, seems almost to spin.

“Scott,” Allison says, and they cannot see her but Derek knows she is close.

“Derek,” Scott says, “Derek, you have to do it again. Will it work?”

“It’ll work,” Derek pants, trying to stop his legs from giving out. “It’ll work if I can do it but Scott, it’s not her. You know that? It isn’t her. She’s dead and she can’t come back. This is just something in her shape.”

Scott nods, but he bites his lip. He doesn’t seem so sure.

“Come on,” Scott says. “Stand up straight. She’s coming, I can hear her. Come on!”

Derek heaves a huge breath and shakily straightens his knees. 

He tries, he really does, but when Allison’s form comes at the with an icy glow around her body and coal-black eyes, his heart freezes over and he cannot dig the magic back up.

He falls, paralyzed by fear, hating himself utterly.

He waits for the end for two seconds (it seems like nine days), and then Scott steps over his body.

He’s staring up at the cold grey sky, but he can hear them loud and clear: Scott’s golden lion’s voice, the demon’s prickly rasp that echoes beneath Allison’s real voice.

“Scott,” it says. “Scott, it’s only fair. I had to die.”

“I said I was sorry,” Scott says, and he chokes on the words but he says them all the same. “I said I was sorry. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry but you’re a lie, a fucking lie, stop haunting me.”

“I’m just trying to live a little.”

Derek feels as though he may vomit.

“Stop,” Scott says. “Go back in the ground, stop haunting me.” He’s crying.

“Scott,” it repeats.

“Let me live my life,” Scott whispers, and Derek feels the air shift as his spell—his own curse, what he developed in the dead of night, locked within his mind—takes shape. He hears Scott cry out as the nebulous pulse of darkness and hatred and revelation leaves his body and envelops the creature that looks like Allison.

And just as he hears Scott screaming, Derek hears a crack of thunder.

* * *

SEVENTEEN.

“I’m in love with you,” Scott tells Derek.

“I’m actually leaving you for Stiles,” Derek says. “He did save your life or whatever. I’m obligated.”

“Shut up,” Scott says.

Derek smiles and shuts his eyes. Scott kisses Derek’s eyelids before pressing a wolfsbane petal onto each one. Derek readies his mind for the spell—to leave his body, to let himself out of the tension stored in this shell and to dissolve, if only for a moment, into the shadows.

“Well?” Scott says.

“It was wicked.”

Scott draws the curtains just as it begins to snow.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
